From: Aaron Trumm <aaron@nquit.com>
quoted 4 lines in that case you have a good point. I wonder what fair use law says about
> in that case you have a good point. I wonder what fair use law says about
> copy protection. probably nothing, probably there's a loophole - or maybe
> not - maybe that's why technology exists to allow one and only one copy of
> things (that's been around since early days of software copy protection)
As I understand it, fair use gives you a right to copy for your own personal
enjoyment, but does not place any obligation on the copyright holder to make
this easy for you. So I could publish a book using some special paper and
ink that would be impossible to photocopy, and it would be perfectly legit.
This is one reason I don't lose much sleep over copy protection - if a
company is intent on doing it, and I'm intent on breaking it, then I'll find
a way fairly easily.
What *does* bother me is stuff like the Millenium Digital Copyright Act in
the USA, a standard that the US is pushing to have adopted internationally.
This would make it illegal to break copy protection, to make tools for doing
so, or even to tell other people how to make such tools themselves. Recently
a Russian programmer was arrested in Washington DC (though later released)
because he works for a Russian company that makes a software tool to
circumvent some commercial copy protection (I forget which one). On a
similar basis, programmers in Sweden (I think) have been sued for posting
the source code used to bypass the region encoding on DVD.
As you can guess, I think this is a terribly flawed piece of legislation. I
also think it's doomed to failure - some people may remember the encryption
software controversy in the early 90s, when PGP was declared 'illegal' the
US government tried to prevent people from getting it. The solution to that
was for lots of people to make the PGP source code/algorithm available
online, and I feel people who object to this newish copyright law to do the
same - just make sure that the necessary source code is spread so far and
wide that trying to supress it is impossible.
OK, 'nuff about that from me.
Anig Browl
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